The Unwelcome Wagon

By: Jeff Kelly LowensteinPublic housing residents relocated from demolished high-rises have settled more often in South Shore than any other community area in Chicago.

And their arrival has evoked strong emotions. “We should economically push them out and build a fence,” Bo Baltis declared emphatically.

Since arriving from Uptown about 18 months ago with his wife, Joanne Mascaro Baltis, the couple has had flowers in their garden ripped out by young people and has contended frequently with garbage thrown from cars onto the street.

Baltis thinks the youth with whom they have had run-ins are former public housing residents. “We can’t fix everybody on the South Side,” he said. “Those who don’t want to behave … should be gone.”

The Baltises were among a group of five South Shore property owners who shared their concerns about former public housing residents—or people they believe to be former public housing residents—with The Chicago Reporter during a rainy November day at the Starbucks on the corner of 71st Street and Stony Island Avenue.

Three of the property owners were black, while two were white. Some had lived in the neighborhood for close to 20 years while others had moved in within the past two years. But all were united in their desire to address what they see as a troubling influx of former Chicago Housing Authority residents.

Loretta Moore said the number of former CHA residents has stifled her ability to rent apartments in a building she owns near the corner of 71st Street and Jeffery Boulevard.

Moore said she has told workers for 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston that she must show the apartments between 5 a.m. and noon so that prospective renters won’t see a group of young people who gather near the corner of 71st and Jeffery hassling passersby and selling drugs.

“I’ve placed ads in local papers, like those near the University of Chicago, but can’t get any response,” said Moore, who moved to South Shore from Hyde Park in 1990. Moore could not say definitively that all of the youth are former CHA residents, but she noted that the youth gather near apartments where she believes some residents are voucher holders.

Yvonne Dixon was not able to attend the meeting in person, but sent a note on behalf of residents in the area of South Shore near Isabelle C. O’Keeffe Elementary School.

“The attempt by the City of Chicago to positively raise the standard of the urban experience for the newcomers in our neighborhood is not working because of the oppositional, predatory behavior they refuse to release,” Dixon wrote in a black felt tip pen.

The letter concluded with a stark message: “If you don’t fit, you must git!”

Delivered with passion and force, the property owners’ comments speak to the simmering conflict between longtime community residents and new arrivals—people often believed to be former CHA residents. This struggle has gripped many of Chicago’s predominantly black neighborhoods, which have received the highest numbers of CHA residents relocated using Housing Choice Vouchers.

But the response varies depending upon the neighborhood. The new arrivals are met with reactions ranging from hostility to indifference. Communities like Englewood and Grand Boulevard, two of the city’s poorest community areas, appear to be more welcoming to the new residents than more middle-class communities like South Shore and Roseland.

In many ways, housing experts said the conflict has less to do with the behavior of former CHA residents and more to do with society’s inherent class conflicts.

And some said that while the responses to former CHA residents, in some cases, are based on perceptions, the hostility displayed has very real consequences for those families and their transition to their new surroundings.

The hostile reception in some communities is more a reflection of the fragility of black middle-class communities than it is an accurate representation of the new neighbors, said Susan Popkin, housing expert at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that conducts nonpartisan economic and social policy research.

“There aren’t that many [middle-class black communities], they are kind of fragile and there is a lot of concern about being tipped back in and being poor,” said Popkin, explaining that many of these communities have fewer high-quality shops, schools and other resources than middle-class white communities. “I’m not sure how [much] of this has to do with how many CHA residents are in the community, and how much is what is already going on in the community.”

In communities where there has been less tension, Popkin said, “there is less difference between the people moving in [and the existing residents]. They are not homeowners as much and are not as concerned about property value.”

For Mary Pattillo, professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University, the interactions speak to broader attitudes about poor people.

“Americans are intolerant of poor people, even if they have been part of a poor family themselves,” said Pattillo, author of “Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City,” which examined the often heated intraracial class conflicts in the city’s North Kenwood-Oakland neighborhood.

Patillo said these conflicts have significant consequences for the families moving out of public housing. In addition to dealing with all the adjustments that come with moving to a new neighborhood— locating grocery stores, enrolling children in school and forming a social network are only three of the major tasks—the former public housing residents also encounter a chilly reception from their neighbors.

“There’s the fear that the [neighborhood] is suddenly going to be a slum or a ghetto,” said Rita Fry, independent monitor of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation. “It puts an extra burden on the public housing families to prove that they should be part of the community.”

Audrena Spence, executive director of Metropolitan Family Services Calumet, says that some former CHA residents moving into these neighborhoods often confront negative stereotypes.

“There are some really good families that sometimes people have stigmatized,” Spence said. “These families want the same things that homeowners want, but have to learn how to attain these things.”

One of the more common stereotypes is that these families destroy the communities in which they live, according to Spence.

But she argued that some of these negative images are based on incomplete knowledge of people’s circumstances. She said, for example, a single-parent with a sick child at home may not have a support system in her new neighborhood and can’t find child care. As a result, she may lose her job—contributing erroneously to a stereotype that CHA residents don’t work.

For his part, Gregary Brown, director of social policy at Metropolitan Family Services, said part of the tension results from different behavioral habits of CHA residents and their new neighbors.

“In a community like Roseland, you can have a family from Henry Horner that may move out there, and the kids may hang out in front of the building,” said Brown, who grew up in one of the Horner buildings. “Since the kid has been in existence, that’s been the status quo, but now people say, ‘That looks really bad.’”

Brown added that some former CHA residents may have low expectations of their landlords and act accordingly: “In the projects, if something broke, it was just broke. People think, ‘What’s the point of telling the property manager?’ When those people move to Roseland and a gate breaks, they just rip it off and don’t call the landlord. But the neighbors are looking at them like, ‘Those people are tearing the place up; they won’t even sweep up their home.’”

Former CHA resident Cherita Muhammad learned about these attitudes first-hand. A single mother, she moved into Roseland with her son Deonte Felker in March 2005. Muhammad said her new street has a lot of older homeowners who are long-time community residents.

About a month after her arrival, Muhammad took a walk with one of her new neighbors, a female police officer. During the course of the conversation, the woman told Muhammad she was “so glad no one from Section 8” was moving into the neighborhood. Muhammad has not told any of her neighbors that she holds a housing choice voucher. “I [want] to see who else thinks that way,” she said.

Pattillo and two Northwestern University colleagues conducted research about the reception of former CHA residents in eight city and suburban communities: Austin, Bridgeport, Rogers Park, South Shore, Uptown, north suburban Evanston, and south suburban Harvey and Calumet City.

“The neighborhoods we studied were overwhelmingly resistant to accepting new subsidized renters into the community,” the authors wrote. “Nearly every community we studied—whether well off or poor, black or white, suburban or urban—reported that it had more than its ‘fair share’ of low-income residents and the housing vouchers they brought with them.”

From his own observations in the Grand Boulevard neighborhood, former CHA resident James Wilson said the reception has been positive. More than 170 former CHA families are using Housing Choice Vouchers to rent apartments in Grand Boulevard.

A former resident of Maplewood Courts in the Near West Side community, Wilson said he and his wife looked at units in South Shore and on the West Side before settling in a cozy two-bedroom apartment in the 4100 block of South Vincennes Avenue.

Wilson said he and his wife chose the neighborhood because it was “up and coming.” The street bears signs of transition with tired-looking brick buildings, newly built two-flats and empty lots.

Wilson stays at home during the days, while his wife takes classes in art and social work at nearby Northeastern Illinois University. Wilson has become friends with three neighbors on his street—“I don’t try to get to know everybody,” he says—and the friendships work because they treat each other with mutual respect.

At the Coppin A.M.E Church in the 5100 block of South Michigan Avenue in the Washington Park community, about 25 children who used to live in public housing have joined the church in recent years, said Pastor Walter R. Bauldrick Sr.

While the process has been bumpy at times, Bauldrick said the relationship is headed in the right direction now that church parishioners and the children have grown to know and understand each other better.

Initially, many parishioners viewed the children as “unchurched” and in need of instruction about the importance of speaking quietly in a religious environment, Bauldrick said. Now about two dozen children come to the church daily for academic help and regularly attend services, too. Church members have become more accepting and come to see the children as their own, he said.

In addition, Bauldrick said he would admonish the children about fighting with others before he learned that walking away from conflict could label the young people as easy targets for more violence. “It was not enough to tell them, ‘Don’t fight,’“ Bauldrick said. “If they get in a fight, I ask them to tell me, ‘What did you do to avoid that’?”

And the sense of acceptance is echoed in Englewood, where Clara Kirk works as founder, president and chief executive officer of West Englewood United Organization, a nonprofit organization that provides housing services for residents and homeless people.

“Not everyone who came from the projects is bad, just like not everyone from the community is good,” Kirk said. “There’s a bad apple in every bushel. With an apple you take it out and throw it away, but with a person you have to figure out what is wrong with them and work with them.”

“We have to understand that everyone needs a place to stay, regardless of where they come from,” Kirk said. “If they tear the towers down, our job is to … help them have what they never had so that everyone can live together.”